A few days ago, Google and the MPEG-LA announced that they had come to an agreement under which Google received a license for techniques in VP8 that may infringe upon MPEG-LA patents (note the 'if any'). Only a few days later, we learn the real reason behind Google and the MPEG-LA striking a deal, thanks to The H Open, making it clear that the MPEG-LA has lost. Big time. Update:Chris Montgomery: "The wording suggests Google paid some money to grease this along, and the agreement wording is interesting [and instructive] but make no mistake: Google won. Full stop."

While Google was previously able to offer WebM as a "licensing free" alternative to H.264, its new licensing agreement means that WebM and its future versions can only offer a cheaper alternative if Google chooses to subsidize the technology. Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, network operators and chip producers will continue to pay the relatively low "Fair, Reasonable and NonDiscriminatory" fees collected by patent owners behind the MPEG H.264/265 pool in order to keep the pace of video technology moving.

Sorry WebM loses out on performance and nobody is building any chips to accelerate it.

Sorry WebM loses out on performance and nobody is building any chips to accelerate it.

Amongst the manufacturers who are implementing webm hardware acceleration we find: AMD, ARM, Broadcomm, NVidia, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, with Intel looking to adopt it for their 'tv chips'. You call this 'nobody'???

It pretty much irrelevant whether he is a troll or not. h264 is here to stay.

Of course it is, same goes for webm. It's not one or the other, same will be true for h.265/VP9.

However, the huge advantage with webm is that it can be the HTML5 video codec standard, something h.264 or h.265 could never be as in order to be a HTML5 standard (and thus mandatory to implement for compliance) it has to be royalty free.

With vp8 we have a codec which is close to h.264 in quality, is free to use and implement everywhere (including hardware, which is why the aforementioned hardware support will most likely keep increasing at a rapid pace).

Not only that, it is also developed with alot of effort placed into low-latency real time performance which makes it extremely suitable for RTC (real time communication) on the web as proven by the WebRTC project used by Chrome, Mozilla and Opera. One which seems likely to be made the web RTC standard by w3c.

In the "Common ARM SoC VP8 support table" on this page, there are more SoCs listed which support VP8 than those which do not. Most of those SoCs listed which do not support VP8 are the older versions. Of the 18 listed companies there are only three SoC makers (Apple, Qualcomm and Sony) which have no SoCs at all which support VP8.

Furthermore, VP8 is easier to decode than H.264, so it has less of a requirement for hardware decode support. VP8 is, however, a lot more computationally expensive to encode than h.264, Despite the expensive encoding fact, since mobiles and hand-helds are rarely used to encode video, VP8 does not lose out on performance to h.264. That meme is just a myth.

"Mobiles and hand-helds" are routinely used to encode video, that's what happens when you record it. Funny how you overlook something so obvious, apparently to convince yourself that webm is in better situation than it really is...

And Qualcomm is the guerilla in the room, what they do has wide repercussions.